Working papers:


Child fostering is a widespread, yet controversial, practice in Sub-Saharan Africa. This paper provides the first long-run assessment of the consequences of childhood fostering among children who are sent out. Our analysis is based on a unique survey of more than 3,200 biological siblings that we conducted in Benin in 2022. We leverage these data with a family fixed effects regression design to assess the consequences of childhood fostering in later-life. Across a range of socioeconomic outcomes, we find no evidence that childhood fostering imposed lasting negative impacts on children who were sent out. Fostered siblings enjoyed better labor market outcomes, had lower fertility rates, and maintained strong social ties to their biological siblings. These patterns hold, even among vulnerable subpopulations, and cannot be attributed to either cross- sibling selection or spillover effects. Taken together, the results suggest that recent policy efforts aimed at reducing or banning the practice are unlikely to be welfare enhancing.

Child fostering is a common practice in sub-Saharan Africa. However, little is known about its determinants. This paper studies the determinants of child fostering in Africa. To do so, we rely on a unique survey that we designed and conducted in the Republic of Benin in 2022. First, we find that parental education and family shocks (such as parental death) experienced during childhood are significant predictors of childhood fostering. Second, we find that a child’s gender and birth order are key factors that determine the choice of the fostered child. We also supplement these findings by analyzing reasons for fostering and find that girls are fostered to help in domestic tasks, whereas boys are fostered for schooling purposes. This gender difference highlights the important role of patriarchal gender norms in Benin.

This paper aims to study the association between linguistic proximity and ethnic proximity in women labor market participation and investigating whether this association persist over a long period of times. By taking advantage from three different datasets and running an OLS estimates that account for the geography of ethnic group’s homeland, I find that linguistic proximity is strongly and significantly associated with ethnic proximity in women's historical labor market participation. Also, I find that there is no association between linguistic proximity and ethnic proximity labor market participation for women in modern days, showing evidence that the historical relationship does not persist until today. Furthermore, this paper show evidence that ethnic group pairs inhabiting a high rule of law country are associated with a high degree of proximity in women labor market participation today. This last finding is suggestive of the important role of national institutions in driving economic assimilation in Africa.


Working in progress:

In this paper, we investigate how economic conditions affect cross-country difference in interethnic marriage in Sub-Saharan Africa. We exploit the arbitrary design of African countries borders that partionned more than 200 ethnic groups across adjacent countries, subjecting them to different economic environments. We find that living in high-income country increase the probability to intermarry by 5 percentage points which represents 28% of the sample mean. However, estimates suggest that this finding cannot be explained neither by urbanisation or by the economic return of education.